OpenAI and Instacart are announcing an interactive grocery shopping experience in ChatGPT that lets you brainstorm a meal, build a grocery list, and check out — all without leaving the chat interface.
This follows an earlier collaboration between OpenAI and Instacart; more than two years ago, the grocery delivery service introduced an in-app AI search assistant that uses ChatGPT to help shoppers find recipes and modify them for dietary needs.
The OpenAI-Instacart relationship apparently did nothing to sour after former Instacart CEO Fidji Simo — who was already a member of OpenAI’s board — joined the company as Applications CEO in May.
Agentic commerce — using AI to conduct shopping research and make purchases on behalf of a person — is a current focus for OpenAI. Its latest dev day session focused on building apps into ChatGPT. In a developer preview, ChatGPT introduced integrations with apps such as Booking.com, Canva, Coursera, Expedia, Spotify, and Zillow; OpenAI has since unveiled more partners, like Target and Intuit.
Ahead of this holiday shopping season, both OpenAI and Perplexity added features to their apps that help make decisions about what products to buy — which means you could ask ChatGPT for the best deal on a gaming laptop with specific specs. AI-led online shopping was expected to grow by 520% this holiday season, according to Adobe.
While ChatGPT is wildly popular, OpenAI does not make a profit and may not for several years — if ever. Its products are so computationally intensive that even subscriptions don’t begin to cover the amount of computer processing power a company needs to run them.
These agentic commerce tools could also provide OpenAI with another way to make money, as it collects an undisclosed “small fee” when it helps merchants close a sale. But you’d have to do an awful lot of ChatGPT-assisted shopping to put a dent in OpenAI’s debt.
